Page 63 of A Recipe for Love
‘No reason.’
‘Bel?’
‘Just, you know, someone like that, she’d be what your grandmother would pick for you, wouldn’t she?’
‘You’re jealous?’
‘No! Not exactly. More just…’ She shook her head. ‘She’s perfect lady of the manor material.’
He dropped his phone onto the counter. ‘Not for my manor. I don’t know if you heard, but I’m in love with someone else.’ She let him pull her close. ‘Desperately, ridiculously, overwhelmingly in love,’ he reassured her.
She buried her face into his shoulder. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered.
‘Don’t be.’
‘She’d fit in, wouldn’t she?’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Did anyone fit anywhere?
He picked his phone up and handed it to her. ‘You can read the messages.’
She shook her head. ‘No. No. I’m being stupid.’
‘OK. Up to you.’ He tapped back and couldn’t help but notice the two blue ticks next to the message he’d sent his mum. Read but no reply. He stuffed the phone back in his pocket. ‘Everyone else is a million miles away.’
‘Anywhere exciting?’
That depended on your definition of exciting. ‘One woman’s a heavy metal singer in Los Angeles, but mostly Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, London, you know.’
All perfectly good places a person could make a life without the pressure to be the perfect laird. ‘Not giving you itchy feet?’ he asked.
‘Nope. This is us. This is where I belong.’ She nestled against him and pressed a kiss to his lips. ‘Here. With you.’
Here was where he was supposed to be. Everyone agreed. He turned slightly to look out of the back window above the sink, away from the courtyard and out towards the hillside beyond, hoping that focusing on the open space outside would lessen the feeling that the castle walls were closing in on him.
From somewhere through the fog in his head he realised Bella was asking him a question. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘What have you been up to?’
Back to reality. ‘The place is in real trouble I think.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘We probably can’t cover the full inheritance tax from insurance.’ He parroted what his grandmother had told him. ‘So the suggestion is that we sell my place in Edinburgh.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘It’s my home.’ He took a seat at the island. ‘But this is my home too. So yeah… And even after that I don’t know if we’d be making enough money to keep the place going.’ That thought almost scared him more than anything else – the thought of Lowbridge slipping further into slow decline, sections of the house being formally closed up and allowed to decay, to hold together an estate and a community that would be dying alongside them. He didn’t want to say the next part out loud. She’d been to McKenzie’s place with him. She knew what the options were. ‘It doesn’t feel like I’ve got a lot of choice left.’
Bella slid her arm around his neck. ‘It’s OK.’
‘I’m letting everyone down.’
‘No.’ He let her slide into the gap between his knees, and wrap herself around him. ‘You’re not letting anyone down. It’s a lot to get your head around. I’ve got some ideas though. Everyone does. We were talking at Ladies’ Group and we came up with the idea of doing cookery lessons and…’
Adam opened his mouth to stop her, to explain that she’d got the wrong end of the stick, but something about the light in her eyes stopped him. She was excited, like Darcy had been when they’d arrived a few minutes ago. They were fired up about Lowbridge. The problem wasn’t the estate. The problem was him.
His phone ringing on the worktop interrupted Bella’s explanation of the incredible ideas the Ladies’ Group had come up with. Bella moved out of the way to let him answer. He checked the screen and frowned. Another thing he wasn’t on top of. ‘Ravi, hi!’
